Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

8.08.2017

"L'Avventura": Wanderers in the space of desire

Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti.

The
films of Michelangelo Antonioni are so stylish and atmospheric that it’s
tempting to see them as expressions of pure surface. His astonishing run of early 1960s films—L’Avventura in 1960, La Nottein 1961, L’Eclisse in 1962, Red Desert
in 1964—are high on mood and low on narrative momentum, even when they seem
to be about such dramatic situations as disappearances and break-ups. L’Avventura,
which baffled audiences when it premiered at Cannes, deceives us by setting up
a mystery that is not only never solved but also gradually forgotten about by
the characters themselves. As the search
for the missing Anna (Lea Massari) comes to feel less and less urgent, L’Avventura morphs into an oblique, chilly
tone poem about her best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), who embarks on an
affair with Anna’s not-particularly-distraught lover Sandro (Gabriele
Ferzetti). Claudia and Sandro spend the
second half of the film drifting from town to town, ostensibly in search of
Anna but acting more out of aimlessness than anything else.

L’Avventura is an environment unto
itself, serene and cool and always quivering with a vague ominousness that
never quite comes to a boil, as exemplified in the brilliant scene where
Claudia finds herself in a village square surrounded by leering men who circle
her like wild dogs. But then the last
forty minutes or so happen, and you realize that L’Avventura isn’t “just” an exercise in style at atmosphere at all—it has become
an eerily perceptive account of the psychological stress that attends a new
relationship, the direction of which is uncertain. (“Avventura” means both “adventure” and
“affair.”) We watch as Claudia tries to
navigate the space of her desire for Sandro: at first apprehensive and guilty,
she eventually succumbs to it, allowing herself to be overwhelmed with passion. Until recently I had always hated the scene
late in the film when, besotted and giddy, Claudia dances around her hotel room
to a dumb pop song. It always seemed like
such a hokey, tone-deaf scene in what is otherwise an impeccably hip film. Then I realized how naked and moving
Claudia’s love for Sandro is in that moment—naked to the point of being
embarrassing. She is naïve and touching
in her confidence that this is real, and that it will last. But in the final scenes of the film we see her riven with doubt, fear, and panic (and guilt—she imagines the vanished Anna
returning to stake her claim on Sandro).

Claudia, love-sick.

L’Avventura
captures
the sense in which two lovers may occupy entirely different emotional states even as they traverse the same ground of their relationship
together. Time, too, becomes elastic in
this state: the film captures the feeling of infatuation, of being drunk on sex, of not being
able to concentrate on anything other than the object of one’s desire, and of
moments apart that seem to stretch on endlessly.
(Antonioni and Vitti somehow make Claudia’s boredom fascinating, as we
watch her stay up all night waiting for Sandro, doodling on newspapers, making
faces at herself in the mirror, reciting random numbers to herself.) The film is a record of an adventure and a
journey, but Antonioni misdirects us so that we don’t realize we’ve been pulled
into the story of an entirely different adventure, and an entirely different
journey, from the one we thought we were watching.